Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture

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Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture. By Patricia Cox Miller. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 273. $39.50.)

In the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, the dreamer Perpetuae says that she awakened from a dream in which she received cheese to eat; "still eating something unknown to me but sweet/conmanducans adhuc dulce nescio quid." How are we to understand this remark? How does the oneiric world of abstract imagining, a world of shape but no substance, a world unlike the conscious world, give rise to her belief that in her present awakened, conscious state she retained in her mouth the taste of a sweet food …